Rudyard Kipling 17 Dick’s benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible. “Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough ’em in with the pencil — Medes, Parthians, Edomites. . .. Now, setting aside the weakness and the wickedness and — and the fatheadedness of deliberately trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I’m content with the knowledge that I’ve done my best up to date, and I shan’t do anything like it again for some hours at least — probably years. Most probably never.” “What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?” said Torpenhow. “Anything you've sold?” said the Nilghai. “Oh no. It isn’t here and it isn’t sold. Better than that, it can’t be sold, and I don’t think any one knows where it is. ’m sure I don’t.... And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the virtuous horror of the lions!” “You may as well explain,” said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head from the paper. “The sea reminded me of it,” he said slowly. “I wish it hadn’t. It weighs some few thousand tons — unless you cut it out with a cold chisel.” “Don’t be an idiot. You can’t pose with us here,” said the Nilghai. “There’s no pose in the matter at all. It’s a fact. I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned passenger-ship turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-had Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and